Latinas Migrants in Europe (Spain and Portugal), from Vulnerability to Social Agency

The last decades have envisioned a shift in the framework that guides different psychological concepts, including those related to well-being, mental health and pathology. Critical Psychology (Pavón-Cuellar, Critical psychology and social struggle: past, present, future. Poiésis, 37, 19–34, 2019; Teo & Wendt, Some clarifications on critical and Indigenous psychologies, Theory & Psychology, 30(3) 371–376., 2020) in line with Decolonial Feminism (Davis, Women, race and class: An activist perspective, Women’s Studies Quarterly,10(4), 5, 1982; hooks, Black women: Shaping feminist theory. In J. James & T. D. Sharpley-Whiting (Eds.), The black feminist reader (pp. 132–133). Blackwell, 2000) has questioned the pertinence and usefulness of traditional psychological categories for approaching the contemporary human psyche, interactions and suffering. Based on an ontology of rationality and individuality and built with positivistic methodologies that in most cases objectify human beings by the labour of statistics and generalisation (Arocha, Scientific realism and the issue of variability in behavior, Theory & Psychology, 31(3) 375–39, 2021), hegemonic psychology has assembled an idea of psychological needs, well-being and mental health that, critical psychologists argue, in some cases pathologies many ways of being and feeling of non-Western male subjects. Underlying this new paradigm of psychology is the idea that human experience lies not exclusively in the depth of individual processes but in the socio-cultural and historical conditions that expand or curtail the conditions of possibility for people (Seco-Martínez, From formal equality to material equality. Cuestiones previas y problemas a revisar, Derechos y libertadas, 36 (Época II), 57–89, 2017). Human well-being and suffering, and therefore their scope and remedies, are not only to be found in neural circuits but also in social interactions, cultural values and practices (Vygotski, The genesis of higher mental functions. In J.V. Wertsch (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet Psychology. Sharpe, 1981). Migration, and specifically the experience of migrant and racialised women, is one of the fields in which a critical stance on mental issues becomes necessary (Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute books, 1987; Marecek, Invited reflection: Intersectionality theory and feminist psychology. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 40(2), 177–181, 2016). When attending to “othered” subjects in social, educational or health services, practitioners informed by the categories of classical psychology might outline a pathological reading of migrant women’s symptoms and psychological needs, using diagnostic categories that might not relate to their cultural assumptions and motives (Macías-Gómez-Estern, Critical Psychology for Community Emancipation: Insights from Socio-educative Praxis in Hybrid Settings. In Machin, Raudelio (eds.), New Waves in Social Psychology (pp. 25–54). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021). On the other hand, in claiming to denounce the deprived and oppressive situations suffered by most migrant women, some studies highlight the mental health consequences of their living conditions (Celorio, Mental health and acculturation stress: changes in family and gender roles in Latin American migrant women (Doctoral dissertation, University of Deusto), 2016), showing that their levels of anxiety and depression are higher than those of the local population. However, these accounts have been considered incomplete from more recent feminist and decolonial approaches (Anleu-Hernández & García-Moreno, Migration, resilience and social work: Latin Americans in Tarragona. The British Journal of Social Work, 44 (suppl_1), 88–104, 2014), which consider that the focus on individual mental health problems obscures the interactional, social, spiritual and emotional resources that migrant women can put into action to healthily navigate the domineering circumstances they are going through while caring for others and maintaining affective bonds. In this chapter, we will analyse these accounts related to migrant women’s mental health from a critical and feminist psychology perspective, where the tension between the need to recognise the socio-cultural origin of mental problems (and pathologies) and the urgency of recognising resilience, agency and power in migrant women is at play. Our reflections will be informed by community-based research on migrant women in Spain and Portugal, with a special focus on Latinas as one of the most represented migrant communities in these European countries.